It’s not because we don’t want to commit or that we don’t care, but because work and success are important to us. They are our focus and anything that comes in the way of achieving our goals and dreams will have to be secondary.

2. Once we commit, we are completely yours.

If we’ve decided that we’re going to commit to you, it means that we enjoy hanging out with you as much as we enjoy our work. We ‘choose’ to be with you, not because we don’t want to be alone, but because we really love your company.

Because — let’s be honest — we have always been in a relationship with ‘our work’. And when you come along, you may have turned our world upside down that we cannot let you go.

3. We will be busy — very busy.

We won’t be able to hang out with you everyday or spend hours watching TV or going to the movies with you. We won’t able to be able to attend everything that you want to attend.

It’s not that we don’t want to see you or that we don’t enjoy your company. We do. But we have a lot of work to do, big dreams to achieve, and we are not going to let time pass by like it doesn’t mean a thing. To us, time is money. Every minute and hour counts.

If you’re a clingy person who demands a lot of time off their partner, you will be miserable with us. Seriously, you won’t be happy with us! We don’t want to hurt you when we can’t spend time with you as much as you want us to.

4. We won’t be able to turn our head off sometimes.

Sometimes we zone out when there’s a problem at work that keeps bothering us and we might check emails every now and then even if when we hang out with you. Sorry, but work seems to be embedded in a part of who we are that we can’t stop thinking about it sometimes.

We might annoy you with our talks about business ideas. We might whine about problems that happen at work or in business. We seriously don’t want to dump all that sh*t onto you but because when we’re not at work, we spend time with you, we just can’t help telling you about everything that happens in our life sometimes — and that everything is usually all about work.

5. We think about the future a lot.

We dream and visualise about the future — the possibility, the steps we need to take, the things we need to do to reach those goals. We’re constantly thinking about it… about our life in the future — what we could possibly achieve and where we could be.

It may seem like we disconnect from the world sometimes because we’re thinking about the future. But this is a way for us to keep our eyes on the prize and ourselves on the goal. It doesn’t mean that you’re not in it. Because if we’ve decided that you’re that person that we want to spend the rest of our life with, and we want to share our future and our success with you.

6. We’re never satisfied with what we’ve achieved.

Once we’ve achieved a goal, we celebrate it for a day only to then start setting ourselves a new one. Because to us, every target is a rung in the ladder on the way to our ultimate success. We’re constantly thinking about the next challenge, the next target to meet, and the next goal.

You may not understand this. You may think we’re weird. You may think we’ll be burnt out which we might or already are. But this is how we function, and we can’t help that we are this way.

7. We need your understanding and support.

It can be tiring and lonely sometimes trying to climb mountains. There’s nothing else we need from our partner more than your understanding and your support. And if we’ve got that from you, when we succeed, we will share everything with you. Just like the saying — ‘Behind every successful man is a woman.’ - we want to be with that person. Hopefully that person is you.

We need you to understand that being able to use our talents and skills to the best possible way we can to succeed gives our life meaning. It makes up our self-esteem and is a part of who we are. So having a partner who understands this and supports us is crucial.

8. If you interrupt us while we’re working, be prepared for a cold response.

When we’re working, we focus. We get into the flow and zoned out — which means we block out all the noise including your voice. Sorry, but we’ll be zoned out until we finish what we’re working on. This is because if we stop to talk to you when we’re in the middle of something, we lose our train of thought — and we just don’t want that.

9. When we are with you, we are truly with you.

We are not with you out of boredom, loneliness, or convenience, because we don’t actually have time to look for something to fulfil those needs — we’ve got work, remember? When we’re spending time with you, it’s because that’s what we want to do above and beyond everything else.

10. We don’t need to always be going out and doing things.

In fact, doing work together on our laptops sitting side by side is actually fun. There’s nothing more interesting and stimulating in our conversations than discussing ideas and interesting work-related topics.

11. The best dates are interesting and intellectually stimulating.

A few fun date ideas would be going to interesting business conferences and exhibitions together, taking courses or classes together, reading books and magazines side by side, travelling to different places and discovering things together, and discussing ideas and talking about life over a glass of wine.

It doesn’t have to be much. Just interesting and stimulating conversations — otherwise, we’ll get bored!

12. The amount of time we spend on work has nothing to do with our feelings for you.

We’d love it if you are independent and give us the time we need to work on our goals and dreams. We’d love it even more if you’re also ambitious and spend as much time working as much as we do. If you can understand this and don’t sulk over it, we will appreciate you and be devoted to you more than you could ever imagine.

13. If you’re looking for someone who is ambitious, then look no further!

The person might already be reading this article and nodding along. Or else, you could also share this article around and see who likes it!

14. Ultimately we want to date someone who’s as ambitious as us.

because then we wouldn’t have to explain all of the points above.

This article was originally published at Brand Mentalist. Reprinted with permission from the author.